Louis L’Amour

Does it say more about me or about the book if I can remember the cover more than the cover?

Between the ages of 6 and 10, I spent serious time studying the covers of the books in my dad’s Louis L’Amour collection. This guy has a cool horse. This guy with the sledgehammer and no shirt and the start of a beard… I want to be him someday. And him. And him.

I wish I could see who the artists were. I’ve heard people say their image of manhood was formed by John Wayne movies. Mine was formed by Louis L’Amour paperback covers in the 1970s.

As super-prolific authors go, he wasn’t bad. Far above Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, because L’Amour had more stock plots. There were about the same number of characters, but his oeuvre has more plots.

Like most super-prolifics, he had a formula. It involved a minor fight within the first few pages, a major crisis of some sort about a third of the way through, a building solution for the next third, and lots of shooting at the end. The hero is always a cowboy, but of a more sexually-moral character than those you’d find in Willy Nelson songs.

I wrote the list below before writing this little review. For each book, I’m almost sure I could sketch the cover. But I can’t remember much about the specific contents.

You can get most of them free online now.

If you like Bernard Cornwell, try L’Amour, and vice versa.

These are the ones I read, between ages seven and twelve:

A Man Called Noon

Bendigo Schafter

Comstock Lode

Down The Long Hills

Fair Blows the Wind

Flint

Hills of Homicide

Hondo

Jubal Sackett

Lando

Last of the Breed

Last of the Breed

Milo Talon

Mojave Crossing

Reilly’s Luck

Ride the River

Sackett

Sackett’s Land

Sitka

The Daybreakers

The First Fast Draw

The Lonely Men

The Quick and the Dead

The Sackett Brand

The Walking Drum

To the Far Blue Mountains

Treasure Mountain

West From Singapore

Yondering

War Party

Bernard Cornwell

I’ve read three of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series: Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, and Sharpe’s Fortress. If these three are any indication of what his other series are like, then they can probably all be included in a single review: Cornwell knows his niche, and he fills it well.

Richard Sharpe, Cornwell’s hero, is a poor, tough guy who got suckered into fighting for the British in India, and then rose to leadership as the British Empire grew to defeat Napoleon. The books follow a simple formula: an opening battle, minor subplot development involving Sharpe’s ambitions and the characters of whatever nemeses he will face in the book, a minor love interest, a betrayal, Sharpe’s ruthless and witty victory, and one or two other big battle scenes.

But you keep reading for the same reason you watch another season of 24 or eat another bag of Doritos: you know exactly where you’re getting, and it may not be the healthiest, but it’s pretty fun.